myownemail.com: "The fiber cut is located about 7 miles out in a swamp and they have
had trouble getting to the problem to fix it. They estimate to begin the actual
splicing at 12:00pm CST. But no indication of how long this will take."

somethingorother.com (subsidiary domain of the above):
"Owned By NixLight of Latin Root"

*cough cough*

Odd flashback this morning - those Weetabix transfer things
that you coloured in with pencils and popped into the oven (if you
were a small, suitably-inclined child in the mid 1980s), creating
a much smaller, thicker-plastic slab which could be fashioned into
a keyring; whatever happened to the technology? Quietly sidelined
for being a lethiferous carcinogen, or something?

Saw Shadow
of the Vampire last night - a solemn and witty reflection on
immortality, with Count Orlock emerging as the only character
deserving of much sympathy or interest. Although it all got a bit
disjointed and oddly-paced towards the end. Quite hard to take
Eddie Izzard seriously as a silent-film-era over-acter with heavy
eyeshadow, too. Let's all go camping in the forest of death and
blood.

Blackwell, who sponsors an Arctic fox at Chester Zoo, is unromantic about his idiosyncratic band. Asked if he enjoys what he does for a living, he's unequivocal: "Enjoy it? Good God, no! One lucrative return on the Fixed Odds and I'm off."

Add my recommendation of Audiogalaxy to the hat.
Its Web-based archive has an impressive list of every song every
owned by any of its users, allowing you to mark obscurities for
collection whenever they appear. Which works nicely with the
stop-and-start download thing. Three cheers.

Mousetrap
- I was playing it earlier -
really is one of the most disappointingly boring board games imaginable, all the
more so given the sheer
potential of the theme. Absolutely no scope for decision-making,
let alone strategy, as if such things don't matter to children. Feh.
I can't ever remember playing Mousetrap properly, either, in my
youth; we just faffed around with the machinery. It never seemed
worth the effort of actually playing.

Astonishing at first glance, but ultimately just a
laptop without a screen or a keyboard, a Walkman-sized
lump of metal to be lost amid cables. It's Jadetech's
easy-to-steal MicroPC XP-933.